Reagan (Eugene Jarecki, 2011) – Simply one of the greatest documentaries I’ve ever seen, an endlessly illuminating, virtuosic study of one of the most fascinating American figures of the 20th Century – a B-movie star turned General Electric salesman turned President – that seeks to tear down Reagan’s constructed image, and explain who he was, what he stood for and whether he’s worth celebrating. The wealth of footage available from Reagan’s life means he’s eminently suited to this kind of profile, and the movie takes full advantage, using archive clips to exalting, chilling and hilarious effect. The sequence illustrating Ronnie’s faltering film career is amazing, including not only a scene with Reagan as a traffic cop that features the worst back projection of all time, but also a clip of him shouting: “Attaboy, Bonzo!” at a chimp, and hugging him. Through intelligent interviewing, sure-sighted polemic and staggeringly brilliant editing (a nuclear war montage cut to 99 Luftballons is a marriage of image and music worthy of Terence Davies at his best), Jarecki creates a dynamic, compelling portrait of a complex figure who made Americans feel good about themselves and their country, but whose simplistic and destructive “Reaganomics” resulted in a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthy that put millions out of work and destroyed entire towns. If your film is described on Twitter as both a “hatchet job” and a “glowing portrait”, then you’re probably doing something right. Really, it’s an incisive, insightful and even-handed documentary that speaks – and listens – to both sides. Reagan's son, Ron, offers an extremely interesting, thoughtful and balanced assessment of his father’s legacy, while Mark Hertsgaard may be the most handsome man in the world. It’s an astonishing, haunting movie - and a must for modern history buffs. (4)
***
Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008) - An impressive doc about an astonishing story: Philippe Petit’s unsanctioned tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. Marsh famously frames the story like a heist movie, cutting between time-frames, and mixing compelling interviews (Petit himself is a wonderful subject: poetic but straightforward) with unusually effective reconstructions, and idyllic archive footage, albeit none of the central stunt itself. The images of Petit in his element – hundreds of feet up, framed against the sky – are mesmerisingly beautiful, as if he were walking on air. (3.5)
***
*SPOILERS*
My Kid Could Paint That (Amir Bar-Lev, 2007) – Four-year-old Marla Oberman is an abstract artist whose paintings sell for thousands. But what starts as a treatise on the nature of modern art turns into a mystery movie midway through, when her family is accused of guiding – or actually just doing – her celebrated works. It’s a fascinating, gripping, sometimes eerie film, laced with moments of cringe comedy (watching Marla’s dad squirm after she tells him, “Your turn to do it”, may be the most uncomfortable I’ve felt in a film this year), that throws up some interesting questions about the skill and mindset required to create great – or successful – art, though perhaps not in the way it originally intended. (3.5)
***
*SPOILERS*
One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald, 1999) – MacDonald’s Oscar-winning – and career-making – documentary tells the story of the group of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics taken hostage by Palestinian revolutionaries. It’s extraordinarily well-researched, securing an interview with the only surviving terrorist, forensically dismantling the Germans’ atrocious handling of the hostage situation and unearthing some remarkable new information, which should really be given greater prominence. But it isn’t particularly well put-together: it spends more time dealing with Nazism than the complexities of Israeli-Palestinian relations, places too much emphasis on certain hostages ahead of others – dictated largely by who agreed to be interviewed – and has montages that range from the daft (confusing race clips, and split-screen images with squashed heads) to the appallingly tasteless, climaxing with a horrific, unjustifiable sequence in which photos of bloodied corpses (partly smudged out) are cut to Child in Time by Deep Purple. It’s really handy if you can’t imagine what a dead body covered in blood looks like. (2.5)
***
Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004) – Wine is probably the most boring subject on Earth, so how come Payne’s film about a lonely, bitter best man (Paul Giamatti) taking the soon-to-be-groom (Thomas Haden Church) on a week-long tour of vineyards is so bloody good? Perhaps because of Giamatti’s astonishing characterisation, which imbues an arrogant, self-destructive, self-hating pseud with a completely disarming humanity. Or perhaps because it’s not really about wine at all, but love and friendship and the choices that people make that end up deciding and defining their lives. It’s the antithesis of formula filmmaking: incredibly entertaining, but also about something, and featuring – quite unexpectedly – a handful of brilliant sight gags. (4)
***
*BIG SPOILERS*
Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1942) is like Our Town’s weird, moody little brother, an overwrought, attention-seeking movie that – much like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet – offers us a small-town idyll, only to immediately destroy it. While censorship restrictions put paid to the source novel’s interest in incest and necrophilia, there’s still melodrama and strangeness aplenty in this visit to the titular turn-of-the-century town, including a mysterious, over-protective father (Claude Rains), a surgeon who seems more than a bit crap (Charles Coburn) and a frustrated good girl who wants to have sex with Ronald Reagan. The film is best known today for featuring the 40th President of the United States’ finest performance (at least before he entered politics, LOL) and while “finest” is a relative term, both Reagan and fellow woodenite Robert Cummings – the nominal star of the piece – are uncharacteristically decent, carried along by a story so packed with incident, so full of vivid light and pitch-black shade, that you can’t help but be swept up by it too. Cummings is the superbly-named Parris Mitchell, a French-American pianist, trainee doctor and orphan who's beset by tragedy. His grandma dies, his mentor poisons his own daughter (and Parris’s girlfriend) before shooting himself, and his best friend (Reagan) has his legs sawn off by a psychopath – prompting his never-to-be-forgotten cry of “Where’s the rest of me?!”, unquestionably the best moment of the movie, and a rare example of Right Wing Ronnie doing something good on screen. Despite its cosy, distinctly Sam Wood-ish trappings, the film – and its emphasis on dark secrets – has far more in common with Douglas Sirk’s “women’s pictures” of the 1950s than with wartime Americana like One Foot in Heaven or The Human Comedy, gleefully embracing soapiness and Gothic melodrama, as well as stopping to rest, periodically, on mile-high corn. It’s not subtle, but it’s very entertaining, powered by a remarkable cast – including doomed child star Scotty Beckett, Betty Field as the last word in nervy young recluses, and Ann Sheridan playing a girl from the wrong-side-of-the-tracks – and an unshakeable commitment to its bowdlerised, batshit story. (3.5)
***
*SPOILERS*
American Madness (Frank Capra, 1932) – A minor classic from Capra and regular collaborator Robert Riskin, in which liberal bank president Walter Huston stands up for the little guy against corporate greed, only for a robbery to force a run on the bank (foreshadowing It’s a Wonderful Life), and his marriage to head for the rocks. It’s expertly directed – particularly in the expressionistic robbery set piece and the overhead shots of an increasingly frantic crowd demanding their deposits – features an atypically cool characterisation from Pat O’Brien, and has a progressive view of both capitalism and convicts, but suffers slightly from a familiar problem with Riskin’s work: he sees himself as a liberal, but he sees ordinary people as stupid and easily manipulated. It remains a fascinating film, great to look at (the art deco sets are sumptuous), but with a brain and a heart: lecturing, in a still-timely manner, that when financial institutions put profit before people, everything goes tits up. (3.5)
***
Away We Go (Sam Mendes, 2009) – After Maya Rudolph gets pregs, she and her boyfriend (Big Tuna from The Office) visit various friends and family – trying to decide where to set up home. The leads are both very good, but their memorable, attractive scenes together are really the film’s sole selling point, and their appealing relationship is the only thing about the whole enterprise that feels real. Aside from their old college pals (including Melanie Lynskey, who performs a stylised but nonetheless gutting "pole dance of grief"), the supporting characters range from the sitcom-ish (his parents) to the completely unrealistic (her former boss), with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ludicrous caricature-of-an-almost-cousin, which belongs in the latter category, spectacularly tiresome: unbelievable, annoying and unfunny, as far away from entertaining as it’s possible to be, and such a cartoon that she’s ultimately meaningless. In all this, the film rather recalls Jim Jarmusch’s unsatisfying Broken Flowers – another downbeat road movie on the subject of family, populated by the sort of people who only exist in indie films. Away We Go is also saddled with a horribly overbearing song score that signposts emotion at every turn. A pity, as Rudolph and Tuna are really good together, and their conversations – treading an affecting line between grown-up decision-making and child-like concerns – frequently feel so genuine and unforced. (2.5)
***
Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006) – An incredibly inconsistent comedy-horror-for-kids, co-written by Community creator Dan Harmon. The characters are rather poorly conceived and most of it is surely far too intense for under-10s, but it’s fairly well-animated in that underwhelming motion-capture way, the story is quite original and it has its share of good jokes, as well as some completely incomprehensive ones, like a 12-year-old boy saying he feels like he’s having a stroke. (2.5)
***
The Accidental Husband (Griffin Dunne, 2008) - Absolutely pathetic. (I was going to watch Bring It On, but the disc was broken.) (1.5)
Next up: a Douglas Fairbanks special!
No comments:
Post a Comment